Sex dolls are replacing China's missing women

China’s sharing economy took a new turn recently, as a new
app,its symbol a single yellow banana, briefly
brought rentable sex dolls to Chinese phones.

CalledTa Qu, to resemble the English word “Touch,” the
app enables users to rent the life-sized dolls, which come in
various models, for $45 a day — with a $1,200 deposit. The
operators assured users that they would be washed between
rentals.

But Ta Qu climaxed all too soon, and it was
rapidlyshut downby the authorities
after the story went viral on the Chinese internet.

But they’re only the tip of a massive and growing market in
Chinese society for sex dolls, as the country grapples with a
growing shortage of women.

Thanks to a long-held cultural preference for sons, coupled with
over three decades of restrictive population planning policies,
China is forecast to have over 30 million surplus men by 2030.
This preference for boys has slowly dwindled, especially in the
cities, but the country still faces a critical gap for the next
few decades.

To help alleviate this and other demographic woes, Beijing in
2015 announced a switch to a nationwide two-child policy, but the
damage to this generation’s sexual relationships has already been
done.

Tyrone Siu/Reuters

Chinese authorities cannot magic up a Canadian-sized population
of women to be the wives, mothers, and caregivers the country
desperately needs now.This has led the nation
in search of solutions, ranging from the improbable
—proposals to revive
wife-sharing— to the unspeakable, such as
arisein sex trafficking.

It has also led to a dramatic rise in the popularity of sex toys
for lonely men.

While reliable industrywide numbers are unavailable, sales of sex
toys on online platforms such as Alibaba and Taobao surged an
average of 50 percent year-on-year in the last five years,
according to a report byGlobal Times.

The lifestyle news siteStartUp
Living Chinareported last year that
Singles Day — China’s biggest online shopping event — saw a surge
in the sale of sex dolls, with one seller offloading 500 units
with an average of one sale per minute. Over 65 percent of sex
toys sold online were to males between the ages of 18 to 29,
according to the report.

I didn’t anticipate this explosion in 2013, when I visited a sex
doll factory in Dongguan, southern China. I was researching
mybookon the consequences of
the one-child policy and was curious about where a nationwide
absence of women might lead.

But I was operating more on hunch than certainty that demand for
sex dolls would escalate.

Even the company I profiled, Hitdoll, was hinging their business
model on a mix of domestic and global sales. Proprietor Vincent
He wasn’t sure China’s burgeoning market of bachelors would be
their best customer base, saying, “Thirty-year-old single men
tend not to spend the money on dolls. They can go for real
women.”

That said, sex toy usage — though not dolls — was already being
normalized in China to a degree that was not the case in the
West, in part propelled by a vast, and mostly male, migrant
population separated from their families.

I knew from my reporting that the shopping areas they frequented
sold products such as artificial vaginas. There seemed to be less
social stigma around the idea than in the West, judged both by
the prominence with which they were displayed in the ubiquitous
corner sex stores and the open discussion of the virtues and
flaws of different devices in male-dominated forums online.

Claro Cortes IV/Reuters

Aside from demographics, China has a demonstrated manufacturing
capacity to bring prices down and tip sex dolls from niche to
mainstream, a combustible mix.

With this in mind, in 2013 I set out to Dongguan, the pulsing
heart of China’s manufacturing belt in the south. Clad in a
leather jacket and jeans, He, an affable man in his early 50s,
met me at his workshop. His company used to make office furniture
for export, but rising labor costs had pushed profits down, so
they began casting around for a new product.

The workshop was small, churning out some 10-12 customizable
life-sized models shipped out in coffin-like crates every month.
Scantily clad buxom models lounged in chairs; some, like the
Venus de Milo, missing limbs. He and his employees showed me
around the premises with a matter-of-fact air, cupping rubbery
teats and parting silicone thighs with as much sangfroid as if
they were still making office chairs.

“The nipples — they are very tough,” said He, tugging vigorously.
“Normal ones,” he said, “could never withstand such treatment.”

At this point all major companies making high-end dolls were
overseas. China was better known for cheaper blow-up dolls that
could be easily transported. Leading companies such as
California-based Abyss Creations crafted customizable models
capable of limited speech and body warmth costing about $8,000 to
$10,000. Hitdoll, in time-honored Chinese manufacturing
tradition, was looking to replicate this with fewer features and
a much lower price point.

For three years, Hitdoll experimented with different prototypes
at a test facility in Guangzhou’s university district. They used
college students as testers, advertising with flyers that said
things like, “Fake Dolls, Real Love.”

To my surprise, these testers formed a group that met regularly
to eat and sing karaoke.

They even had a name, the Kawaii Club — using a Japanese term for
cuteness, especially as applied to young women, adopted into
Chinese. Feng Wengguang, a former Guangdong University of
Technology student, was a member.

His description of his experiences sounded like a perverse
telling of Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Early on, the Kawaii
Club members complained the prototypes were too stiff, too cold,
too unreal. (The manager, He, remembered receiving feedback such
as, “Your doll is so cold, like a dead body.”)

Feng, then 24, viewed all this as playful experimentation. He
never saw himself as part of Hitdoll’s audience demographic.

He never saw himself as part of Hitdoll’s audience demographic.

He and the other Kawaii Club members were sure they could “find
real woman.”

Weren’t they worried about hygiene issues? Vincent He showed me
the disposable rubber vaginas they used. Each Kawaii member got
to keep them after the trials, he said.

It was a real perk, he assured me: such things typically retailed
for about $15. All in all, the Kawaii Club soldiered through 100
prototypes before Hitdoll developed a model worthy of exhibiting
at the Guangzhou Sex Culture Festival.

Most of that reporting trip didn’t find its way into my book. For
one thing, I worried that a great deal of this was speculative.
Nobody knew for sure how China’s gender gap would play out in the
long run, and I didn’t want to overstate the importance of what
might be a small-bore attempt to address a big problem.

It also sounded unbelievable, especially to Western ears. A sex
doll maker called “He,” pronounced “Her”? And his workshop was in
Guangzhou’s university district, known in Chinese as Longdong? (I
still remember firmly pressing the “delete” button on my computer
after spelling it out.)

In retrospect, my visit to Dongguan was significant given China’s
current gender chaos. The city, a manufacturing hub of the
Chinese south, embodies skewed gender relations: it’s powered by
female factory workers, yet ruled by men.

In its heyday, visiting male executives spent several months
there away from their wives, with extended off-work bacchanals at
the numerous karaoke bars, clubs, and brothels that earned
Dongguan the nickname “Eastern Amsterdam.”

Like Silicon Valley, Dongguan owes its existence to globalization
and expansiveness but is riddled with hidebound, intense sexism.
There is perhaps no more apt place for birthing the instruments
that could take China’s gender wars into its next phase.

Police
conduct a head count of suspects who were detained during a
police raid, as part of plans to crackdown on prostitution, at a
hotel in Dongguan.China
Daily/Reuters

Soon after my visit, the government launched a major crackdown on
prostitution in Dongguan, turning the notorious red-light city
a“deep pink.”The crackdown,
which began on Valentine’s Day, proved so ruinous it wiped out an
estimated$8 billion in takings, about one-tenth of the
city’s total revenues, according to Lin Jiang, a finance
professor at Sun Yat-sen University.

Dongguan never completely recovered its anything-goes air as
China’s mecca of prostitution. But as trading of real women
flagged, the market for fake women in China began to take off.

The increasing use of sex dolls has of course amplified
concerns — both in and out of China — as to whether this sexually
objectifies real women and encourages
a Westworld-like rise in
violence. “Men’s rights activists” online
have long argued that widespread use of sex dolls will deprive
women of their supposed power over men.

'Men’s rights activists' online have long argued that widespread
use of sex dolls will deprive women of their supposed power over
men.

Some supporters of sex dolls even argue it could actually
decrease rape culture and reduce demand for sex
trafficking.

The latter argument is of real concern in China, which the U.S.
State Department this year named one of
theworst offendersin the
global sex trade. It’s unclear exactly how many women are
trafficked into China from neighboring countries, but numbers are
definitely on the rise, spurred by the absence of young women
from the marriage market, especially in rural areas.

Vietnam alonehad an
estimated 4,500 women trafficked between 2011-2015, with 70
percent taken to China, where a Vietnamese “bride” could fetch
about $18,500.

These arguments are of course echoed in other parts of the world
where usage of sex robots are increasingly more popular,
including even the opening of a sex
dollbrothelin Spain. But what
might appear to be a whimsical desire in, say, Japan, looks
expeditious inJiangxi,where the gender
ratio is 138 men to 100 women. (The average global ratio is 105
men for 100 women.)

China’s gender gap is already contributing to
arise in violent crime, with China’s bachelors
demonstratinglower self-esteemand higher
rates of depression and aggression. The gains made by its
educated female workforce are already sparking nostalgia for the
past, including the rising popularity of lectures promoting
subservient women.

In my book, I described one such workshop, where the lecturer,
Ding Xuan, said strong women are more cancer-prone because, “The
gods are helping you, as you do not want to be a woman any more.”

Linda Pittwood, who studies the representation of women in
Chinese art, said the dolls are “an extreme representation of
women as submissive objects of fantasy, available to be borrowed
around by a number of men.” She added, “These are all really
damaging ideas, which I think will leak out from the sex
doll-sharing service and reinforce where women are regarded in
these ways in wider culture.”

The controversy is bound to intensify as sex dolls become more
popular — and lifelike. Hitdoll’s competitors, the
Dalian-basedDS Dolland 2015
newcomerJ-Suntech, are already rolling out models that
can be programmed for limited speech and movements through
smartphone apps. (The models on Ta Qu’s stymied doll-share app
can be programmed to make moaning sounds.)

It’s ironic, but arguments that sex dolls
are dehumanizing will only strengthen as the models become more
realistic.

Arguments that sex dolls are dehumanizing will only strengthen as
the models become more realistic.

But they all shared the same still, unnatural face, and
fell squarely into the uncanny valley between human and
machine. More realistic dolls, however, could blur the boundaries
between real women and sex objects.

“Realistic” women are the aim of many Chinese robot-makers, even
if most of them aren’t doing it for straight-up sexual purposes.

Jia Jia, developed by the University of Science and Technology of
China in Hefei, was able to conduct astilted
interviewwithWiredwriter
Kevin Kelly.

A former Huawei computer engineer created a robot he found so
realistic he“married”it in 2016. Fed up
of being teased about his bachelor status, Zheng Jiajia held a
faux marriage ceremony with robot Yingying, vowing to eventually
upgrade the robot’s abilities until it can walk and do housework.

Still, a country desperately trying to raise birth rates and keep
its economy churning might have bigger problems. As Pittwood
pointed out, “That is one thing that the sex dolls can’t
offer: babies.”

Mei Fong is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of
"One Child: The Story of China's Most Radical Experiment."